Google Releases Social Search Early But Without Facebook

Posted by Tanya Hall

October 27, 2009

Not a company to rest on its laurels, Google has made good on its intentions stated last week, that it would roll out a new social networking search tool to trawl through “tweets” as part of its search results.

Google Social Search can be found on Google Labs and is aimed at helping you “find more relevant public content from your broader social circle,” said the company on its blog.

Social Search works by creating a profile on Google and adding links to the social networks you want covered, such as Twitter, FriendFeed or LinkedIn. It will also include your Gmail contacts as part of your “social circle”.

Your social search results will then include a scan of your nominated sites for relevant information.

One noticeable omission to the social network though is the daddy of the social networking world, Facebook.

Facebook announced a similar deal with Microsoft search engine Bing, which will include real-time indexing of “status updates” and other Facebook info in your Bing search results.

This has raised questions as to why Facebook isn’t striking a similar deal with Google? Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg emphasised that no money changed hands between Facebook and Bing, so why is the biggest social networking site missing from Google’s new search tool?

We can only assume that there’s a bit more going on under the surface of the “one big happy family” spin.

Privacy-wise, Google has been quick to reassure that search results won’t include private data, and that any results would only include information that could be found online by other means.

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